King Midas: a Romance eBook

The man bent forward and kissed her again, and kissed
away a little of the frightened, anxious look upon
her face. “My dear,” he said with
a gentle smile, “perhaps I was wrong to trouble
you with such fearful things after all. Let me
tell you instead a thought that once came to my mind,
and that has stayed there as the one I should like
to call the most beautiful of all my life; it may help
to answer that question of yours about the use of
having lived. Men love life so much, Helen dear,
that they cannot ever have enough of it, and to keep
it and build it up they make what we call the arts;
this thought of mine is about one of them, about music,
the art that you and I love most. For all the
others have been derived from things external, but
music was made out of nothing, and exists but for
its one great purpose, and therefore is the most spiritual
of all of them. I like to say that it is time
made beautiful, and so a shadow picture of the soul;
it is this, because it can picture different degrees
of speed and of power, because it can breathe and
throb, can sweep and soar, can yearn and pray,—­because,
in short, everything that happens in the heart can
happen in music, so that we may lose ourselves in
it and actually live its life, or so that a great
genius can not merely tell us about himself, but can
make all the best hours of his soul actually a part
of our own. This thought that I said was beautiful
came to me from noticing how perfectly the art was
one with that which it represented; so that we may
say not only that music is life, but that life is
music. Music exists because it is beautiful,
dear Helen, and because it brings an instant of the
joy of beauty to our hearts, and for no other reason
whatever; it may be music of happiness or of sorrow,
of achievement or only of hope, but so long as it
is beautiful it is right, and it makes no difference,
either, that it cost much labor of men, or that when
it is gone it is gone forever. And dearest, suppose
that the music not only was beautiful, but knew that
it was beautiful; that it was not only the motion
of the air, but also the joy of our hearts; might
it not then be its own excuse, just one strain of it
that rose in the darkness, and quivered and died away
again forever?”

When David had spoken thus he stopped and sat still
for a while, gazing at his wife; then seeing the anxious
look still in possession of her face, he rose suddenly
by way of ending their talk. “Dearest,”
he said, smiling, “it is wrong of me, perhaps,
to worry you about such very fearful things as those;
let us go in, and find something to do that is useful,
and not trouble ourselves with them any more.”

CHAPTER II

“O Freude, habe Acht!
Sprich leise,
Dass nicht der Schmerz erwacht!”

It was late on the afternoon of the day that Helen’s
father had left for home, and David was going into
the village with some letters to mail. Helen
was not feeling very well herself and could not go,
but she insisted upon his going, for she watched over
his exercise and other matters of health with scrupulous
care. She had wrapped him up in a heavy overcoat,
and was kneeling beside his chair with her arms about
him.